forge your own fate

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Lately, I've been going through the Gallery of Magick's books, which I thoroughly
enjoy, but I did come across this interesting tidbit through their FAQ. The writer
Damon Brand assumes that after doing your spell or ritual, you need to almost
forget about it to work. He reiterates that while it's ok for you to have a big
desire or need, constantly worrying over it can ruin the magick.

Quote: "Why does Lust For Result matter? Why can’t you do magick, long for your
result and still get it? The simplest answer is to say that when you check up on
the magick, test the magick or hope that it’s working, you are reinforcing your
current state of doubt."

Does anyone confirm whether this has been true or not for them in their path? And a
hypothetical situation, what if someone is desperately poor and hungry. Say that a
person does a spell or ritual. Each day passes, and that person gets hungrier and
more desperate by the day. Of course, they are going to think whether or not their
magick works every passing moment, and they can't help it. So are we saying magick
can't work in really desperate, life-and-death situations?
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This is basically true.

If you're desperate, the chances of magick working are low.

However, there is a bit of a problem in how you formulate the requirements for
magickal success. "Lust for results" is an interesting phrase. I'm not sure you
should use that phrase. Why not?

That's because you need to want the result. If you're indifferent, or don't care
about the result, you won't get it. You have to want the result and be interested
in it. It's fine and even good to look forward to a result. Having a positive
expectation is a good thing.

The problem happens when you go overboard with wanting a result. When you get
desperate, it's not so much doubt, it's the state of mind equivalent to begging.
Begging is a powerless state. The inner meaning of begging is powerlessness. So
when you get desperate, you inwardly beg in terms of meaning, even if you don't
formulate your spell as a beg, it gets the meaning of begging anyway. When you beg
it means what happens to you is up to some external grace and it's out of your
hands, which is exactly the opposite of magick. In magick you forge your own fate.

So desire for results is a good thing. Too much desire is bad. Too little desire is
bad. It has to be just right.

But there is another wrinkle. You cannot take appearances as informative if you're
doing magick. Appearances are only suggestive. In magick what determines meaning is
will, not how things look, not appearances. So whether you have a right to expect
something or not is not given to you by appearances, but by will. But we have a
tendency to narrate appearances as authoritative and authentic, which is contrary
to magick. So ask yourself, if the sky is cloudy, is it really cloudy? If you see a
texture reminiscent of wood, is it really wood? If you experience a sensation
suggestive of distance, is there really a great distance? If you answer "yes" it
means you have a habit of taking suggestive appearances as informative. You let
appearances dictate meaning to you. Which also means you don't have any power over
the appearances. It's one and the same thing. When appearances are imperial edicts,
you cannot override them via magick. Only when appearances have been demoted to the
level of being merely suggestive, only then can you hope to override them via
magick.
So in other words, the psychology required to make magick work is very tricky, and
you need to understand metaphysics to a great degree. Like everything I just
explained about appearances, authority and authenticity has to be well understood
to make use of magick. But "tricky" doesn't mean illogical. Magick is actually very
rational and simple.

There is a good formula for developing psychic power in Buddhism:

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn51/sn51.020.than.html

The four aspects are: desire, persistence, intent, discrimination. You have to
achieve perfection in all 4.

Desire, as you can see, is a necessary aspect. So there is no need to play games
with yourself where you want something and try to make yourself not want it. That's
nonsense.

Basically, if you want something, you have options that are reasonable:

Should you want it? If you investigate the issue, you may abandon some desires, but
then, you also abandon magick with regard to these abandoned desires. Some desires
are bad, because when you fulfill them, you create difficult circumstances for
yourself down the line. The reason for this is because in order to fulfill some
types of desire, you rely on inherently contradictory conceptions, which create
conflicts. So for example, you want get a job, but working for others without
access to resources and without the power to say "no" is slavery. So you sort of
get more resources, while you make your world a less free world, because you make
your world into one where you have to work more. So you may get a job, but your
NEED to get a job may increase with the spell. It's like you get a sugar drink, but
your need to drink sugar drinks in the future also increases! There are many
desires like that, which when you satisfy them, bring temporary benefit while
moving your entire manifestation toward a more difficult path as a side-effect. You
have to watch out. There are many dumb and substandard desires, and you have to
know what those are based on your own wisdom. Magick can fulfill any desire, but if
you fulfill a dumb desire, you'll slap your own face.

If you decide WISELY yes, it's OK to want something, then you need to achieve a
perfect desire. Not too much, not too little, with perfect forbearance and
patience.

So yea, it's a paradox. The more desperate you are, the less magick can help you.

It's like in a lucid dream, the more you fear the demon, the less power you'll have
over that demon. Power is not a solution to fear. Fearlessness is a prerequisite to
power. So it's backward from how most normal people think. Normal people think they
need power to become relaxed and at ease. But on the contrary, only when you feel
relaxed and at ease do you get power. Power is a reward, in other words. It's what
you get when you achieve perfection. Power is not a tool.

But mundane people think power is a tool. In magick power is not a tool, but is a
reward for those who have been enlightened and became perfect.

So magick can be very reliable, including in a life and death situation, but if you
were the kind of adept who could rely on magick, when you're in the middle of a
life and death situation, you feel calm, like a boss, fearless, ready for anything,
patient, not itching to prove anything to anyone, competent, self-possessed,
flawless, etc. When this is how you are in the middle of a life and death
situation, then you have extraordinary power and you can do strange things that
don't make sense to normal people.

We see this paradox everywhere. For example, the dumber you are, the more you need
explanations but the less you understand explanations. The wiser you are, the less
you need explanations, but the more you understand explanations. So those who don't
need help, get it. Those who need help, don't get it, basically. The worse off you
are, the less likely you are to get help. So it's important to break the cycle of
bad meaning construction here and to do this you need to embrace that you can be
extraordinary. You can break the rules. If you let the rules stand, then according
to the rules, the more you need help, the less likely you're going to recognize and
able to make use of the help that's available. To snap out of this catch 22 you
need a very special frame of mind.

Everything I say here is about magick and is not applicable outside magick. A lot
of idiots who get mundane success will think they're powerful when exactly the
opposite is true. If you want to know about your own power, first of all, you
cannot test it, but if you break the rule and test it, the way to test it is to do
something that "cannot be done" by convention. If you can do it, then you have
power. So doing something that's well-accepted by convention is not an example of
magick or magickal kind of power. Getting a job is not an example of a magickal
power, unfortunately. Lots of conventionally-minded people get all kinds of good
jobs without the slightest use of magick. If anything, if others can get jobs
without magick and you have to magick yourself a job, it's kind of sad, and maybe
magick is not the right solution here.

Magick is the right solution when you want to go beyond convention in some way. If
you like convention, just use the conventional methods. There is no need to be
confused here. If you like convention, then act like it.

There are so many confused people who can't decide if they like or don't like
convention and their magick is evidence of that. Their results will always be
confused and mixed. If you subscribe to a convention as a consumer of that
convention, you cannot simultaneously be the author of that convention. Consumers
consume. Authors create. Authors are magickal. Consumers are not. Consumers only
consume the givens. If there are no givens to consume, consumers starve.
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